There’s something that repeats in almost every company I talk to. Something I hear over and over.
Someone from leadership decides the team needs training. A provider is sought, the course is set up, the announcement goes out… And then something predictable happens: half of the people who should attend sign up, half of those who registered actually show up, and among those who come, half are scrolling on their phones.
In the end, someone fills out the satisfaction survey with a 7. And everyone is happy. Until next year, when it starts all over again.
The problem isn’t your team. It’s the language
Large companies have HR departments that talk about competencies, development plans, and leadership frameworks. They have time, budget, and people dedicated exclusively to thinking about this.
SMBs have owners with problems piled on the desk. And traditional training is designed for the first group. Then it’s sold to the second without changing the language. And that’s where it all starts. Nobody wakes up at 3 a.m. thinking “I need to develop my communication skills.” They wake up thinking: “I have two people on my team who don’t talk to each other, and it’s driving me crazy.”
«Mañana tengo que decirle a mi mejor trabajador que no puede seguir hablando así porque está hundiendo la moral del resto. Y no sé cómo hacerlo sin que se vaya». «Llevamos tres meses con la misma reunión semanal donde se habla de todo y no se decide nada». «El nuevo encargado tiene 28 años, técnicamente es un crack, y el equipo no le hace ni caso.»
That’s what’s on your people’s minds when they sit down for leadership training. And if the training doesn’t speak to that, their minds wander. Not because they’re lazy, but because their real problem lies somewhere else. Specifically, in the warehouse, on the shop floor, or in the meeting room where yesterday the same thing happened again.
The excuse of time isn’t what it seems. When I ask why they don’t attend training, the most common answer is: we don’t have time. That may be true—SMBs are already maxed out—but notice this: when there’s a big problem, time appears. If an important client complains, schedules are reorganized. If there’s a serious conflict on the team, they find the moment. If something threatens the business, suddenly there are hours to fix it.
Time isn’t the problem. The problem is that training isn’t seen as something that resolves urgent issues. If a mid-level manager at an SMB, with a desk burning with problems, gets invited to a course on “Situational Leadership” they’ll say: What are you talking about? At best, with a lot of luck, it might seem interesting. But interesting, in an SMB, always loses to the urgent.
Training in competencies vs training for challenges
Traditional training starts from a competency: leadership, communication, feedback, teamwork. Words that sound great in a catalog and that in the warehouse manager’s head connect to absolutely nothing concrete. What does connect is this:
- Not “leadership,” but how to talk to the worker who has been arriving late for three months, you’ve told them twice, and the situation remains because you don’t know how to escalate it without turning it into a bigger conflict.
- Not “communication,” but how to get the sales and production teams to stop blaming each other when there’s a client problem and start solving it together.
- Not “feedback,” but how to tell someone who’s been with the company for ten years that the way they treat the newer teammates is becoming a real problem.
See the difference? It’s not semantic; it’s the difference between something that sounds interesting and something you need to fix this week. And when training starts from that place, two things happen: people come. And when they come, they’re truly present—no phones, no clock-checking.
If you’ve identified the challenge, the next step can’t be a class.
Here comes the second part of the problem. And this is where a lot of well-intentioned training falls apart.
Imagine you’ve detected that your managers delay tough conversations with their teams. Great. You’ve got the real problem. And now you send them to a course where someone spends two hours explaining how it’s done—complete with PowerPoint? It doesn’t work, and you know it.
Knowing how to do something and being able to do it under pressure are two completely different things. A soccer player doesn’t learn to take penalties by listening to a talk about penalties. They take them. Again and again. Until the body has it, and the mind stops freezing when the moment arrives.
People skills work the same way
What works is an environment where you practice the real situation. Where your manager can rehearse that difficult conversation, make mistakes, receive immediate feedback, and try again. Without the real consequences of getting it wrong. Without the other person on the other end actually being their employee.
That’s experiential training. It isn’t about doing dynamic activities to make people have fun and give a 9 on the survey. It’s about creating the conditions for learning to happen where it always has: in practice. In repetition. In the controlled error that doesn’t cost a client or an employee their job.
Where to start? If you want training to work in your company, change the question. Replace “which competency does my team need to improve?” with “what concrete situation repeats week after week without a resolution? What conversation is my supervisor avoiding? What keeps my sales leader up at night?”
There lies the starting point because when training answers that, it stops competing with the agenda. It becomes something people need. And that, in an SMB where every dollar and every hour counts, makes all the difference.
Coté Soler, CEO of BeLiquid
